royalsandcelebs

Batting seventh and playing first base for The Abomination of a Baseball Team… Calvin “Picked Last” Pickering!

First, the good news: Calvin Pickering is our first player in about a week who hasn’t been on The Mitchell Report.  Did I just end that sentence with a period?  I meant to end it with an exclamation mark!!!  Way to go, Cal!  Unfortunately, a little juice may have helped you out from time to time, as you were a very bad Major League baseball player.  I mean, really bad.  I’m sure you’re a very nice man, and, as much as I hate talking badly about “the most famous former baseball player from the Virgin Islands” (take that, Midre Cummings!), I must do it.  A little backstory?  Sure.  Why not?

Calvin “Surely Picked Off” Pickering was drafted in the 35th round by Baltimore in 1995.  For the next 10 or so years, he spent most of his time in the minors, putting up pretty good numbers.  He usually hit for a good average; he usually hit a lot of home runs.  One year in Baltimore’s Double-A affiliate, he hit about 116 RBIs.  He got a few call-ups when he was younger (a la Phil Hiatt, a la a lot of guys), but didn’t show that he really belonged.  He eventually ended up in Cincinnati for a second, and then Kansas City. 

Pickering came up during September call-ups during that horrific 2004 season in KC, arriving soon after we finally gave up on the Ruben Mateo era, where offensive futility was at its maximum.  For Heaven’s sake, Ken Harvey was our All-Star–Ken Harveybars!  His first half wasn’t even all that great.  He had a good batting average.  It was around .300 for a while, and finished the year with a .287 average.  As a whole, however, the brain trust of the Royals didn’t really see a future for Ken Harvey.  His All-Star selection had more to do with MLB’s long-outdated rule that all teams must be represented in the All-Star Game than with his numbers (after all, it’s All-Stars, not All-Teams).  His average was good, was, but it was at first base, a position loaded with offensive giants.  Ken Harvey, with his 8 or so home runs at the break and .338 on-base percentage (a mere 30 points higher than his batting average at the time), did not belong, but when your team puts a Ruben Mateo and an Alberto Castillo on the field every day and somebody has to go, someone like Carlos Delgado is going to be let out (it might have even been David Ortiz–I know some big names got left off that year).

Across the country, baseball fans saw the selection as an absolute joke, and I think management did, too, because when 2005 came around, Ken Harvey was fighting for his starting job with this Calvin Pickering guy.  During his call-up, he hit 7 home runs in 122 at-bats.  Not bad, but, at the same time, it’s September.  A lot of times, it’s a battle of the call-ups versus the call-ups, where minor league vets who put up monstrous numbers get to face off in a battle for their lone career Sportscenter highlight, much less a mention by their favorite local sportscaster.  Pickering appeared to have not only earned an “Attaboy!” by Jack Harry (better than hearing his disappointing grump of “Goodness gracious!”), but was, for some inexplicable reason, in a dead-heat with Harvey.

After a spring where Pickering continued his streak of hitting a lot of home runs that didn’t actually count for anything, he was on the team, and Ken Harvey was sent to Triple-A.  Honestly, I’d have been a lot happier if Ken Harvey was just released, for his own sake.  How humiliating must it be to be your team’s lone All-Star pick, and then get demoted to Omaha the following year?  I’d take the cut, personally, and just keep telling people I demanded, like, $12 mil a year with my own personal burro to ride around Kauffman Stadium.  But Omaha?

Pickering, at 28-years-old, made what had to be his first Spring Training roster.  His totals for the year?  Four hits.  4 hits.  F-O-U-R hits.  And with that, he was done, back to the minors.  Harvey eventually came up, played for a month (including a surprise grand slam), and got injured, never to be seen in a Kansas City Royals uniform after 2005.

Pickering, like a LOT of other guys on this list, had NO BUSINESS being on this team.  None.  Absolutely preposterous.  Ken Harvey may not have been a legitimate All-Star, but you can’t deny one thing: if every team has to have a representative for the game, and they chose Harvey, then Harvey must have, at the very, very, very least, been the best player on the Royals in 2004.  That makes about 24 guys ahead of his expendable for the following season… in theory.

On the other hand, after 2004, Harvey didn’t really do much, even when he did make it back to the club.  He signed later with the Twins, but just toiled away in their farm clubs for a couple of years.  He’s actually playing with the Kansas City T-Bones now, which is more than a little sad.  He gets to play baseball every day, at least.  I suppose that part’s good.  Pickering played on that club, too.

Were the Royals right when they thought that Ken Harvey didn’t have a bright future with the club?  It appears they were right.  That said, he still didn’t deserve the kind of display put on by the team in Spring of 2005.  Pickering was just a 295 pound guy who should have spent the rest of his baseball days knocking flat change-ups out of the park in Toledo and Birmingham and, yes, Omaha.  He had no business making the Royals, and was almost used as a pawn to disgrace the baseball career of Ken Harvey.  Harvey Wallbanger didn’t deserve that, but neither did Pickering.  They should have never teased him like that.  They made him our absolute worst first baseman, no doubt about it.

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